Well, I don't have many clues about Perl internals as well. But it looks like Perl-API is a very experimental work by Gisle Aas and was previously tested only for versions up to 5.8.5. The changes in later versions apparently broke the ad-hoc magic of the distribution.

It can be restored by applying the following patch to Makefile.PL: 

--- Makefile.PL    2007-01-25 15:05:56.000000000 -0200
+++ mk.pl    2007-01-25 15:06:54.000000000 -0200
@@ -77,10 +77,11 @@
     if ($args =~ /\.\.\./ ||
     $args =~ /\*\*/ ||
     $args =~ /\b(PerlInterpreter|PADOFFSET|const)\b/ ||
-    $args =~ /(STRLEN|I32|U8|int|[INUG]V|HE|PerlIO)\s*\*/ ||
+    $args =~ /(STRLEN|I32|U8|int|[INUG]V|HE|PerlIO|MAGIC|STASH)\s*\*/
+ ||
     $args =~ /(^|,)\s*(sv)?type\b/ ||
     $ret =~ /\*\*/ ||
     $name =~ /^X?PUSH/ ||
+    $name =~ /^SvREFCNT/ ||
     $AVOID{$name} ||
     0)
     {

[download]

The patch only adds declarations with MAGIC and STASH into the stuff marked as "some we can't handle yet" and the same for names starting with SvREFCNT.

I am not sure of how much the distribution is usable, because if you uncomment the various print statements you will see that many parts of the API are skipped as the simple configuration script is not able to build the XS binding to them. But it doesn't stop you of fixing this state of things and probably Gisle will appreciate a patch to improve the general state of the distribution.

Update: filed at the Perl-API RT queue as rt.cpan.org #24585.

In reply to Re: How to compile Perl::API? by ferreira
in thread How to compile Perl::API? by Burak

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